For the first time in the almost 11 years since Jeffrey Baldwin died in his grandparents’ custody, an employee from the child-welfare agency involved with the little boy’s family for decades is testifying in a public forum about the decisions the agency made.

Sal Salmena, a supervisor with the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, is just one of a succession of workers who were one way or another bamboozled by Elva Bottineau, the aggressive, mentally diminished woman who was Jeffrey’s grandmother.

Despite her failings, Bottineau was deemed by Mr. Salmena and many others as a strong support for Jeffrey’s young parents — so much so that he referred to her at one point Tuesday as “the grandma option.”

As it turned out, the agency failed to check its own records and didn’t discover that “the grandma” was a convicted child abuser, as was her common-law husband Norman Kidman, until after they had also abused and starved Jeffrey to death.

He died of pneumonia and septic shock, secondary to chronic starvation, on Nov. 30, 2002.

At almost six, he was a skeletal ruin of a child. He weighed a pound less than he had as a one-year-old.

In the years since his death, Bottineau and Kidman were convicted of second-degree murder and of forcible confinement for their regular locking up of the little boy and a sister in a bedroom where they were forced to live in their own waste.

None of the workers from the CCAS was called to testify at the criminal trial, with the result that the Ontario coroner’s inquest now probing the case is the first public body to examine the conduct of the agency and its staff.

It was not an auspicious beginning.

Mr. Salmena was the supervisor of Margarita Quintana, the social worker in charge of the file when in November of 1994, the first complaint about Jeffrey’s parents, Yvonne Kidman and Richard Baldwin, came into the agency.

That complaint, from a neighbour of the young couple, appears to have been the trigger for Bottineau to re-involve herself in Yvonne’s life — she had kicked her out of the house at 16 and the two had had little contact, though the agency was unaware of all this — and start seizing her and Richard’s children in family court, all with the approval or “facilitation” of the CCAS.

Mr. Salmena also later presided over a couple of agency “high-risk” case conferences that involved the couple’s second child and when Yvonne was pregnant with Jeffrey.

Bottineau was involved in one of those conferences, and by this point, Mr. Salmena acknowledged, “she’s a significant player now” with considerable power.

As Ms. Quintana’s direct supervisor, albeit for only a few months, Mr. Salmena described her as “capable, an average worker, she wasn’t a stellar worker” who had a thick accent and significant difficulties with both written and verbal English.

While he said she “did all the things that had to be done,” in fact there were real problems with Ms. Quintana’s notes, which either were minimal or riddled with misspelled names — this in a profession where record-keeping is critically important so that information about allegedly abusive parents or alternate caregivers can be verified.

Ms. Quintana, for instance, spelled Bottineau three or four different ways in formal documents.

As Freya Kristjanson, the lawyer for Jeffrey’s surviving three siblings, remarked caustically, “I’m not suggesting they did any records checks but if they had [using one of Ms. Quintana’s butchered spellings], they would have got nothing.”

Mr. Salmena said “there was nothing” in the information the agency had that would have led Ms. Quintana to ask probing questions of the young parents that might in turn have seen Yvonne disclose details of her own upbringing at Bottineau’s hands.

Yet as Ms. Kristjanson pointed out, even in Ms. Quintana’s bare-bones notes, there were red flags: Mr. Baldwin had told the worker Bottineau had “rejected” Yvonne; the young parents pledged once in a contract with the agency to give their child a better childhood than they had had, and Bottineau was frankly harsh about Yvonne not being worthy of a second chance with her baby.

And while Mr. Salmena said he had learned to take what young parents like Yvonne and Mr. Baldwin told him “with a grain of salt,” it appears neither he nor anyone else thought to apply that sort of healthy skepticism to Bottineau.

At the time, records checks in such “kinship” adoptions weren’t required by either the province or the agency.

Now, they are.

But what is bewildering about all this is that Elva Bottineau managed to fool anyone, let alone an entire agency of trained professionals.

She didn’t appear to be anything other than what she was — a tough warrior from the hardscrabble margins of society.

After she was convicted of assault causing bodily harm in the 1969 death of her first baby, Bottineau was assessed by a psychologist, who described her as a woman in the “mental defective borderline range” who was also canny with “a tenacious ability to satisfy her needs.”

Norman Kidman was convicted in 1978 of two counts of assault causing bodily harm for a severe beating he gave to Bottineau’s other two children by another man.

So badly were the children beaten that they were apprehended by the CCAS directly from the Hospital for Sick Children.

All of this damning information was in the agency’s own files.

Indeed, the jurors have been told by a CCAS records expert that had someone done the mandatory check on Yvonne, it should have revealed that as a child, she and her two sisters, Bottineau’s children by Kidman, were under a supervision order by the agency.

As Ms. Kristjanson put it once, the agency decision that the grandparents were super caregivers was “unsupported, untested and made with only negligible information.”

It rather renders Mr. Salmena’s straight-faced contention that child welfare “is not a pure science” understatement of the year.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.